arn't you concerned about some salt build up in the radiator being that close to the surface.

As I知 still suspecting it値l be a couple more years until I can take it to the salt, I知 going to build a couple of air coops / rock guards for the coolers that will extend forward to just under (or maybe make some cutouts into) the front bumper. When I get to the aero portion of this build, all of those coolers will be ducted out of the engine bay also to help reduce/eliminate high pressure in that area. Plus, before I actually get it to the salt, I知 fairly certain I値l extend the front end a bit forward, which will give me a lot more room to move things around.

Not sure if I missed any backgroung info but what do you do for a living and did you have much welding experience prior to the start of the build. And for someone who says their tig skills arent all that, those are some pretty welds

Nope, no real welding training, all self taught. Just a 28yr/old office monkey. I bought a flux core when I was 16, but didn稚 really accomplish much with that until my early 20s when i started building stuff for my motorcycles. I bought a used mig and tig at the beginning of this project from a friend who was upgrading. Total time tig welding is maybe just under 2 years at this point. Probably went through half a dozen bottles of argon, so whatever amount of time welding that would give me. At the beginning a lot of what I was building, i was doing more for the practice (water and fuel tanks, etc.) rather than making a final product. Oddly enough, to me tig welding seems rather easy once I finally grasped the concept of what I was actually looking for. All it took was a friend of mine letting me stick my head in his way while he welded. I had to actually see it to understand.

This is one of the most badass builds I have ever seen. Very impressive display of technical knowledge and abilities to be able to thinnk through the issues, fabricate and weld the solution, then use the laptop to make it all talk to each other...

Since this got bumped- I finally got it moved out of the garage yesterday. Re read all i could on the tuning manuals so i had a much better idea of what i was looking for. Only tuned it for idle/no load up to 1500 so it didn't have enough oomph to make the turn before I got to the bad/untouched parts of the maps. Now the task of running in the fuel and timing maps. I'll get those to "good enough" in the driveway before taking to the back roads to get it dialed in. Hopefully the next videos I post are of some mighty burn outs

Stobl, Fun build to read and follow, of course you are doing all the work. Do you have one or two contacts on your cam senser shaft?Richard

The cam sensor is my old distributor with a half-moon shaped trigger wheel welded on top to let it know what rotation it's on. It uses a hall sensor (same one used for the crank sensor). While i was moving the car out of the garage, i actually finally realized that the reason the car was randomly turning off when it warmed up, was because the crank sensor is mounted off the water pump...and when it heated up too much (Spec says its good to 80*C, or 176*F), the sensor dies. After turning on the radiator fans for a few minutes to cool it down, the car starts right up. I guess i need to figure out a way to either not mount it off the water pump (would be a pain pain), or figure out how to remove the heat transfer through the mounting plate. I'm thinking maybe minimize the mounting contact with the pump, and also drill some holes in the sensor mounting plate (1/4" aluminum) to allow it to radiate heat better.

Stobl, Fun build to read and follow, of course you are doing all the work. Do you have one or two contacts on your cam senser shaft?Richard

The cam sensor is my old distributor with a half-moon shaped trigger wheel welded on top to let it know what rotation it's on. It uses a hall sensor (same one used for the crank sensor). While i was moving the car out of the garage, i actually finally realized that the reason the car was randomly turning off when it warmed up, was because the crank sensor is mounted off the water pump...and when it heated up too much (Spec says its good to 80*C, or 176*F), the sensor dies. After turning on the radiator fans for a few minutes to cool it down, the car starts right up. I guess i need to figure out a way to either not mount it off the water pump (would be a pain pain), or figure out how to remove the heat transfer through the mounting plate. I'm thinking maybe minimize the mounting contact with the pump, and also drill some holes in the sensor mounting plate (1/4" aluminum) to allow it to radiate heat better.

You might replace the aluminum mounting plate with a piece of Phenolic board or something similar-- even birch plywood-- so that its heat conductivity is lower.

Oops. Sorry about the lack of updates. Nothing tooooo exciting at this point. Back to finishing up all the half-completed tasks i had laying around. New springs for the front, built a puke tank, patching the floor, new timing bracket, etc. I did start building the intercooler which is pretty interesting to me. I was looking around for my camera this weekend to post pictures, but it turns out I left it with the girlfriend who's up in Boston now- so pictures are going to have to wait until she brings it back to me in a week or so.

The biggest hurdle now is still the tuning. I had it running decent enough before the weather turned cold, but then it screwed up my half-assed tune and I couldn't get it started. I gave up on that in late October since it was getting colder and there were other things i wanted to get done. I'll admit i was just frustrated and didn't feel like messing with it at that point. I saw the 2013 ECTA schedule and I'm hoping if all goes well I should be able to get to the June event. My job's contract is ending in March so I have to scale back on the car a bit until i can get another gig lined up. After that it'll be full speed to get it ready.

Going to haul it to a friends farm this weekend to do some major tuning (neighbors house is about 30 feet away and they're not too happy I'm making noise all the time). Friend has 10+ acres so I can make all the noise I want for 14+ hours. Once that's all good to go, then time to start finishing up all the lose ends I have left Then of course, I'll have to put the turbos on and get a little more tuning done.